The following is excerpted from Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology; his own source is Samuel Yellen's American Labor Struggles, published by Harcourt Brace in 1936.
My curiosity was aroused. In none of my classes in American history, in none of the textbooks I had read, was there any mention of the Ludlow Massacre or of the Colorado coal strike. I decided to study the history of the labor movement on my own.
This led me to a book, American Labor Struggles, written not by a historian but an English teacher named Samuel Yellen. It contained exciting accounts of some ten labor conflicts in American history, most of which were unmentioned in my courses and my textbooks. One of the chapters was on the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914.
I was fascinated by the sheer drama of that event. It began with the shooting of a young labor organizer on the streets of Trinidad, Colorado, in the center of the mining district on a crowded Saturday night, by two detectives in the pay of Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation. The miners, mostly immigrants, speaking a dozen different languages, were living in a kind of serfdom in the mining towns where Rockefeller collected their rent, sold them their necessities, hired the police, and watched them carefully for any signs of unionization.
The killing of organizer Gerry Lippiatt sent a wave of anger through the mine towns. At a mass meeting in Trinidad, miners listened to a rousing speech by an eighty-year-old woman named Mary Jones--"Mother Jones"--an organizer for the United Mine Workers: "What would the coal in these mines and in these hills be worth unless you put your strength and your muscle in to bring them.... You have collected more wealth, created more wealth than they in a thousand years of the Roman Republic, and yet you have not any."
The miners voted to strike. Evicted from their huts by the coal companies, they packed their belongings onto carts and onto their backs and walked through a mountain blizzard to tent colonies set up by the United Mine Workers. It was September 1913. There they lived for the next seven months, enduring hunger and sickness, picketing the mines to prevent strikebreakers from entering, and defending themselves against armed assaults. The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, hired by the Rockefellers to break the morale of the strikers, used rifles, shotguns, and a machine gun mounted on an armored car, which roved the countryside and fired into the tents where the miners lived.
They would not give up the strike, however, and the National Guard was called in by the governor. A letter from the vice president of Colorado Fuel & Iron to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in New York explained:
The strikers responded. One strikebreaker was murdered, another brutally beaten, four mine guards killed while escorting a scab. And Baldwin-Felts detective George Belcher, the killer of Lippiatt, who had been freed by a coroner's jury composed of Trinidad businessmen ("justifiable homicide"), was killed by a single rifle shot by an unseen gunman as he left a Trinidad drugstore and stopped to light a cigar.
The miners held out through the hard winter, and the mine owners decided on more drastic action. In the spring, two companies of National Guardsmen stationed themselves in the hills above the largest tent colony, housing a thousand men, women, and children, near a tiny depot called Ludlow. On the morning of April 20, 1914, they began firing machine guns into the tents. The men crawled away to draw fire and shoot back, while the women and children crouched in pits dug into the tent floors. At dusk, the soldiers came down from the hills with torches, and set fire to the tents. The countryside was ablaze. The occupants fled.
The next morning, a telephone linesman, going through the charred ruins of the Ludlow colony, lifted an iron cot that covered a pit dug in the floor of one tent, and found the mangled, burned bodies of two women and eleven children. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre.
As I read about this, I wondered why this extraordinary event, so full of drama, so peopled by remarkable personalities, was never mentioned in the history books. Why was this strike, which cast a dark shadow on the Rockefeller interests and on corporate America generally, considered less important than the building by John D. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Company, which was looked on as an important and positive event in the development of American industry?
I knew there was no secret meeting of industrialists and historians to agree to emphasize the admirable achievements of the great corporations and ignore the bloody costs of industrialization in America. But I concluded that a certain unspoken understanding lay beneath the writing of textbooks and the teaching of history: that it would be considered bold, radical, perhaps even "communist" to emphasize class struggle in the United States, a country where the dominant ideology emphasized the oneness of the nation "We the People, in order to...etc., etc." and the glories of the American system. (pp. 52-53)
A close look at the Colorado coal strike would reveal that not only the state government of Colorado, but the national government in Washington--under the presidency of a presumed liberal, Woodrow Wilson--was on the side of the corporations. While miners were being beaten, jailed, and killed by Rockefeller's detectives or by his National Guard, the federal government did nothing to protect the constitutional rights of its people (There is a federal statute -- Title 10, Section 333 -- which gives the national government the power to defend the constitutional rights of citizens when local authorities fail to do so).
It was only after the massacre, when the miners armed themselves and went on a rampage of violence against the mine properties and mine guards, that President Wilson called out the federal troops to end the turmoil in southern Colorado.
Then came the killing of Louis Tikas, the Greek leader of the strikers. We saw the militiamen parley outside the tent city, and a few minutes later, Tikas came out to meet them. We watched them talking. Suddenly an officer raised his rifle, gripping the barrel, and felled Tikas with the butt.
Tikas fell face forward. As he lay there we saw the militiamen fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and deliberately fired them into the unconscious man's body. It was the first murder I had ever seen, for it was a murder and nothing less. Then the miners ran about in the tent colony and women and children scuttled for safety in the [underground] pits which afterwards trapped them.
We watched from our rock shelter while the militia dragged up their machine guns and poured murderous fire into the arroyo from a height by Water Tank Hill about the Ludlow depot. Then came the firing of the tents. . . . The militiamen were thick about the northwest corner of the colony where the fire started and we could see distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing torch waved in the midst of militia a few seconds before the general conflagration swept through the place.
ROCKEFELLER: There is just one thing . . . which can be done, as things are at present, to settle this strike, and that is to unionize the camps; and our interest in labor is so profound . . . that interest demands that the camps shall be open [nonunion] camps that we expect to stand by the [Colorado Fuel and Iron Company] officers at any cost. . . .
CHAIRMAN: And you will do that if it costs all your property and kills all your employees?
ROCKEFELLER: It is a great principle.
CHAIRMAN: And you would do that rather than recognize the right of men to collective bargaining? Is that what I understand?
ROCKEFELLER: No, sir. Rather than allow outside people to come in and interfere with employees who are thoroughly satisfied with their labor conditions -- it was upon a similar principle that the War of the Revolution was carried on. It is a great national issue of the most vital kind.